Well - I completed installation twice. Upon reboot, I get nothing. I suspect that partitioning wasn't done right, or the bootloader isn't installed correctly. The machine goes through it's BIOS startup, then it just stops, like it is searching for the boot loader or something.

During setup, I permitted Ghost to use the entire hard disk, and to automatically partition the hard disk. I checked the little checkbox to install the BSD boot loader. And, I'm kinda lost at that point.

In both cases, I used a SATA drive, installed as master, on SATA channel one - the only other SATA device on the machine was the DVD drive installed as master on channel two. Ghost was installed from that DVD onto the SATA hard drive. When the first installation failed to boot, I swapped to another hard drive, with similar characteristics, and installed to that hard drive.

I wonder whether Ghost is actually partitioning the hard disk - and if not, how do I need to set up partitions? How can I check to see whether those hard drives have active partitions?

I must note here, that the FreeBSD handbook installer is NOT like the installer that I worked with on the Ghost 4.0 DVD. Neither the text nor the images match up.

Failed twice to install

HiI had a similar issue with the installation, UFS, disk entire, boot loader, MBR, with these options work for me!http://wiki.ghostbsd.org/index.php?titl ... stallationIt could help you. Boot loader check only if you have ghostbsd as unique system or dual boot with Windows machine.

You can boot on prompt console press 2 in the menu boot and say your /var/log /message file with your issues.

Thank you Jackz. It may be the weekend before I make another attempt - I've worn myself out with a couple little real live problems today. I could start the install again, but I unplugged the hard disk, and plugged in the disk with Sparky Linux installed on it.

When the partitioning options come up again, I'll go with what is on that page. It will be a standalone install, with no other OS's installed beside it.

Alright - I'm thinking it's the hardware. I ran through the whole thing again, on a hard drive that I deleted partitions from. As soon as I try to boot to a UFS partition, the hardware seems to lock up, trying to decide what to do with it. I'm running a ten year old mainboard, with an early Opteron CPU on it. It just doesn't seem to recognize the hard drive after Ghost has formatted it. So, now I have three hard drives which "lock" the computer when attached.

I don't know how to read it. First, I'll have to re-install the hard drive into the computer, and figure out how to get the computer to boot to one operating system or another. Each of the hard drives now freezes the computer before POST completes. It has to be a hardware issue - either I have something set wrong in BIOS, or the computer is not capable of mounting as UFS partition.